XML for the Masses

XML 2002 Jean Paoli and his Microsoft team generated real excitement at the XML 2002 conference with his announcement that XML would be at the heart of future Office development, and the demonstrations - which ran badly overtime - convinced a lot of us that this was real.
Reaching the desktop XML has done really well for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances, but it's primarily been a server-side technology, hampered by relatively weak desktop implementations and programs that didn't speak XML at all.
Building on a foundation Microsoft has talked for years about how crucial XML was to their plans, and already had relatively solid XML and XSLT support, both derived from Internet Explorer and from its .NET and Web Services work. (Excel and Access also both had some XML functionality in earlier versions.)
Freedom at last? As both Microsoft and the OpenOffice team were discussing their plans for XML in desktop applications, it seemed to a lot of people that XML had come of age, and the old proprietary format barriers were coming down.